A West Midlands blogger has been charged with terrorism offences for allegedly using a blog to list members of parliament who voted in favour of the Iraq war.
Bilal Zaheer Ahmad, a 23-year-old man from Wolverhampton, was arrested a week ago by West Midlands Police.
He will appear before Westminster Magistrates Court later …

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West Midlands ministry of love...

I hope the headline is inaccurate

The way an MP votes should be in the public domain.

If he incited racial hatred or violence then fair enough, throw the book at him, but simply showing which way an MP votes should not be sufficient reason to arrest someone. After all you want to know that your MP is representing you and not the party line.

Maybe

Maybe by "make them pay" he ment get them voted out of office or perform legitimate protests against them at public venues? He may not have, but how does one prove that he ment "go out there and stab these people" shouldn't be allowed to put people away for what they may have ment but for what you can prove they did mean.

Now if he included information on how to make a bomb to blow the people up, or how to knife some one, etc it'd be more clear cut.

That's the problem with these kinds of offenses, you can neither prove nor disprove what was ment.

Yeah...

...I am sure poor Bilal wanted them to pay by signing them up to a subscription of "What Car" magazine.

I know for a fact that the police love making things up and wasting the court's time with innocent victims whose only crimes are to go around posting stuff on perfectly innocent islamic terrorist message boards.

Dunno about a terrorist

While not supporting the actions of extremists,

it does seem to be a gross misuse of this law. Surely this information is in the public domain in any case and available to anyone who cares to search for it. Such a search (and presumably copying of the list so that one is in possession of it in a tangible form) could be for any number of reasons, many or most of which could not in any way be regarded as connected with terrorism.

Not quite the same, but...

Not quite the same, but I started a 'blog' years ago that listed every action merkin forces have been involved in since the revolution. I also listed all the 'alleged' merkin assassination attempts, 'police' actions etc.

All of a sudden my access either through a control panel or FTP vanished as did the information I was hosting.

I am not muslim, I am white, British and a fine zyder-drinking Bristolian but that didn't help with any requests to the server hoster or the powers that be (or were, this was shrub/bliar era).

But being Jewish

The list is a matter of public record

Press Association also reports (here: http://bit.ly/b7MpGP) that "The list of MPs who voted for the Iraq war was removed from the extremist website revolutionmuslim.com after the Home Office urged the US to act against it." And yet, this is a matter of public record, published by Parliament itself, and publicly available at places like TheyWorkForYou or PublicWhip. Here for instance is the list of MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq War as listed by PublicWhip: http://bit.ly/9sedrN

Re: A crime we all seem guilty of

Words FAIL me

Wow, I'm sure every item in existence could be described as containing "information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" so we're clearly all guilty!

If this blogger is a little bit naughty in the terroristy sense though surely some help from mental health professionals would do the trick, not a court case. And I'm giving the police and courts the benefit of doubt saying that as from the sounds of things all he did was make a list of publicly available information and he gets the blame for some nuttah he doesn't even know, actions!

WTF?

So this guy posts a list of people who voted for war, some unrelated person stabs one of these people and now the poster of the names (which is just a reposting of public domain info anyway) is a terrorist?

Am I missing something here? I wonder if his name had been Mr. Jones or similar that the same fate would befall him?

List of mps!

Perspective

I think it was less the listing than the incitement to commit violent acts against the people listed that was the problem - referring to the woman who tried to kill Stephen Timms as a 'heroine' for example according to the Press Association, and calling for Muslims to "raise the knife of jihad" against them (according to CNN).

The blog you couldn't find was apparently on Revolutionmuslim, the site that was forced to take the down the list a couple of weeks ago.

Evidence?

Given that we've no idea what the evidence is here, then I guess we might have top do something radical and see what is presented in court rather than prejudging it. I assume it's rather more than a simple list of the name of MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq invasion. That's public information and available from sites such as http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ . In the meantime the headline does seem to be jumping to conclusions.

@Steven Jones

But it's much easier to write articles saying he was 'arrested for listing MPs' than to be more long-winded (and possibly accurate)and say he was arrested in connection with a blog which, among other things, had a list of MPs on it.

If one is lucky, if, later on, it turns out that reality actually was less simple than the earlier headline suggests, some of the paranoid brigade will just end up concluding that charges were altered to get the guy, rather than simply having been misdescribed in the first place.

The non-existent changes could then be seen as yet more evidence of Big Brother at work (even if one doesn't have the fun any more of blaming Jacqui Smith for everything, and pretending that not a drop of one's vitriol was down to her being a woman.)

None of my vitriol ...

... was because Jackie Smith is a woman, but because she was in my opinion stupid, insensitive, two-faced, and incapable of holding the office she had. That is my opinion of anyone of either sex that has held the position of Home Secretary in the last 25 years at least.

What?!

Not touching the 'solicitation' thing - I guess the guy was too heated on his blog, or something - but that's only the secondary charge. Did my country really just arrest someone primarily for reposting publicly available, open license information? http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/ will give you records for all MPs for all votes since 1997. That's a lot of material to suddenly decide is illegal.

wait, what?

so ordinary citizen's vote isn't a secret (thanks to that little barcode at the back.of the voting card) but duly elected representatives votes *in our friggin' name* are protected by anti-terror legislation? So how can they be accountable to their electors?!

Sir

I know it's a bit off-topic, but could you explain how that barcode relates to me? I didn't get a specially assigned to me bit of paper at the ballot box that I'm aware of, I just got given the next one in the pile, I think.

sure

Sir Runcible Spoon

When you vote they check your ID and make a note of which ballot paper you are assigned - watch what they do at the next election.

From the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8497014.stm

"The ballot papers contains a serial number: it is possible, but illegal, to trace all the votes to the people who cast them. The number is there to stop electoral fraud. "

From The Grauniad: http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,00.html

"Votes can be traced by matching the numbered ballot paper to its similarly numbered counterfoil; the numbered counterfoil also bears the voter's registration number from the electoral register which is hand-written by the Polling Clerk when the ballot paper is issued. As all the ballot papers for each candidate - including fringe candidates such as Sinn Fein, communists, fascists, nationalists, etc. - are bundled together, anyone having access to those documents can speedily trace the name and address of every voter for such candidates if they wish."

@Lee

>>"anyone having access to those documents can speedily trace the name and address of every voter for such candidates if they wish."

>>Scared yet?"

No, not really, since I'd reckon that in any system where such information would be likely to be meaningfully abused, there would be plenty of things to worry about far nastier than a possible twice-a-decade snoop at how people voted.

@lee

>>"anyone having access to those documents can speedily trace the name and address of every voter for such candidates if they wish."

>>Scared yet?"

nope! Because all this allows you to do, is look up who completed a ballot paper if you had hold of it. If you were to look up a person on the list, you would then have to spend hours, or days, going through all the papers to find theirs to see how they voted. you can't collate the information, or derive any trends. you can technically match individual votes back to the person who cast them, but it's a very hands on process!

Unless there are armies of people secretly keying all the ballot papers into a database against this id :o

Right but..

People, like your self, reason that it's nearly impossible/pointless to trace me. And two elections down the line, everyone is sold to the idea and this whole barcode thing is forgotten...

Next come in the electronic ballot counting (which scan your vote as well as the barcode..) (and you get assurance that it's still a paper vote... just being counted by robots not humans)... And they start scanning the top and the bottom.. and lo they have a database.

Go visit the Dokumentum in Bavaria and then get back to me

Not equating the current government with the Nazis by any stretch but all this was managed in the 1930s with at most some basic mechanicals.

" If you were to look up a person on the list, you would then have to spend hours, or days, going through all the papers to find theirs to see how they voted."

You wouldn't generally do it that way - you'd look at the ballots cast for a certain candidate and then trace the people who voted for that candidate. You either go on a watch list for voting for party X or alternately for *not* voting for party Y.

"you can't collate the information, or derive any trends."

I am afraid I disagree totally: you can, from easily obtainable documents, establish the following information:

-A list of potential voters

-A list of registered voters

-A list of people who voted

-Who each voter voted for

I am afraid that there is plenty of information there to be "collated" and any schoolchild could derive the trends from that rich a data source.

"but it's a very hands on process!"

So was building the pyramids, or the railways or the Manhattan project.

"Unless there are armies of people secretly keying all the ballot papers into a database against this id"

I very much doubt this is happening. But there is a really big gulf between "not happening" and "not possible" - that is what is scary.

OK we are all "content" that no matter the hyperbole about our police state etc. we accept that our main political parties are either reasonably honest or too incompetent to perpetrate serious electoral shennanigans but would you feel the same way if people like the English Defence League, the BNP or the communists were a major force?

Re: I thaught we where all owned by the Chinese

Too much openness?

Not knowing a whole lot about the way our government works the thing that suprises me most is that it is even recorded how individual MPs vote. I assumed that such votes were anonymous, and cant see it being beneficial that they arent, for reasons including but not limited to the ones these "home grown" terrorists have just highlighted.

@ The elephant in the room

When we elect an MP we are effectively entering into a contract of sorts with them - they promise to do stuff we want so we give them our vote - and teh accompanying big salary, stupendous pension pot and rediculous expenses regime.

We can only tell if they keep their side of the bargain by recording how they vote. Remember, an MP is not elected to vote the way the MP wants, they are elected to vote the way their constituents want. In practice they vote the way their party leader wants but that again is only provable if votes are recorded.

@Grease Monkey

>>"There is no requirement for that MP to do as his/her constituents want for the next five years."

Indeed.

Which is probably good, since there's no mechanism in place for working out what the constituents actually want.

However irritating it might be to hear MPs who got elected on about a third of the votes of the people who bothered to vote talking about having a 'mandate', one of the main guides to an MP on how (the people who voted for them) want them to vote is the promises that they personally made or that their party in general made before an election, and even then, events can overtake promises fairly easily.

While many people may find it hard to trust someone who says they intend to do X but then does Y, equally, many people would also find it hard to trust someone to run a country if they made a decision at some point in time and then refused to even think about changing their mind if the situation changed, or better information became available.

In practice, most people's ideas about the value of consistency on the one hand or the possibility of someone thinking twice on the other are not based on Deep Unchanging Moral Principles, but more flexibly on whether they think the person in question should or shouldn't change their mind on a particular issue.